The balanghai approached Trinidad, and Pigafetta bid farewell to his hosts and rejoined the fleet. It had been, over all, a pleasant interlude, with the exception of the nightmarish vision of the men hanging from bare trees.
Still unable to pinpoint the Spice Islands, the fleet weighed anchor “and laying our course west southwest, we cast anchor at an island not very large and almost uninhabited.” They were veering seriously off course, heading west into the Sulu Sea, toward China, rather than south to the Spice Islands. In its wanderings, the fleet called on the island of Caghaian, as Pigafetta designated it. Once again, he enthusiastically went ashore to establish relations with the islanders, but this time other crew members accompanied him. Their mission: to find enough food to restock their rapidly dwindling stores before they starved.
Only a short distance from their previous anchorage, the fleet encountered a far more predatory culture. “The people of that island are Moros”—Moors—“and were banished from an island called Burne”—Borneo. “They go naked as do the others. They have blowpipes and small quivers at their side, full of arrows and a poisonous herb. They have gold daggers whose hafts are adorned with gold and precious gems, spears, bucklers, and small cuirasses of buffalo horn.” Fortunately, these menacing-looking warriors believed that the European intruders were “holy beings” and spared them from harm. But the ravenous sailors found no food to speak of and, growing desperate, the armada embarked on a twenty-five-league detour to the northwest, almost directly away from the Spice Islands.
The search for food grew more frantic. “We were often on the point of abandoning the ships in order that we might not die of hunger,” Pigafetta wrote. At last they arrived at “the land of promise, because we suffered great hunger before we found it.” The island was called Palawan, and it divides the Sulu Sea from the South China Sea. Although the fleet was getting even farther from its goal, Palawan offered a tropical paradise to men who had endured so much for so long. “The winds are mild, the sun warm, the sea teeming with fish,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison of the island. “The land is so fertile that for more than half a year, after the main crops are gathered, people have nothing to do but enjoy themselves.”
Their stomachs growling and their heads spinning from fatigue and hunger, the sailors rushed through another casicasi ceremony with the local chieftain and then gorged themselves with “rice, ginger, swine, goats, fowls,” and “figs . . . as thick as the arm.” Pigafetta declared these “figs,” actually bananas, to be “excellent” fare. That was not all; the grateful crew members also sated themselves with coconuts, sugarcane, and “roots resembling turnips in taste.” Pigafetta pronounced their wine, distilled from rice, to be exceedingly light and refreshing, far superior to the rough palm brew they had been drinking for weeks. Hours before, they had been so desperate that they contemplated the prospect of relinquishing the safety of their ships to forage for food. Now they offered thanks to God for saving them from starvation.
When he had filled his belly, Pigafetta once again became an amateur anthropologist. He charmed his island hosts into displaying their exotic weapons for him: “They have blowpipes with thick wooden arrows more than one palmo long, with harpoon points, and others tipped with fishbones, and poisoned with an herb; while others are tipped with points of bamboo like harpoons and are poisoned. At the end of the arrow they attach a little piece of soft wood, instead of feathers. At the end of their blowpipes they fasten a bit of iron like a spear head; and when they have shot all their arrows they fight with that.” In this culture, Pigafetta found, the fascination with combat included their animals. “They have large and very tame cocks, which they do not eat because of a certain veneration they have for them. Sometimes they make them fight with one another, and each one puts up a certain amount on his cock, and the prize goes to him whose cock is the victor.” The more closely he looked at cultures like these, the more he began to see disturbingly familiar suggestions of his own.
When the crew had rested and loaded provisions onto the ships—provisions for which their weeks in the Pacific had taught them to barter skillfully—they weighed anchor, and on June 21, 1521, prepared to leave Palawan. This time, they had on board a local pilot, a Negrito who gave his name as Bastião, and said he was a Christian, but he vanished just before the fleet left the harbor. In search of a replacement, Carvalho ordered the fleet to encircle a large balanghai. Feigning peaceful intentions, the armada captured all three of the balanghai’s pilots, believing that they would lead the way to the Spice Islands at last, but these pilots—all Arabs—complicated matters by directing the armada southwest, toward Brunei, an Arab stronghold, rather than southeast, toward the Moluccas.
This was a hazardous crossing, replete with shoals and sandbanks, and the fleet needed the pilots’ assistance to reach Brunei. Even Albo, the resolute pilot, became agitated on this leg of the journey. “You must know that it is necessary to go close to land, because outside there are many shoals,” he complained in a rare outburst, “and it is necessary to go with the sounding lead in your hand, because it is a very vile coast, and Brunei is a large city, and has a very large bay, and inside it and without it there are many shoals; it is necessary to have a pilot of the country.” Reaching the mouth of the harbor, the fleet followed junks whose pilots were familiar with the route to safety. At last, they dropped anchor in the harbor of Brunei, in the midst of a realm of enchantment and luxury that would surpass anything they had previously experienced on the voyage.
The next day, July 9, what appeared to be a proa appeared on the horizon, but as it approached, the crew realized it was a much larger vessel “whose bow and stern were worked in gold. At the bow flew a white and blue banner surmounted with peacock feathers.” Trailing the ornamental proa were two smaller vessels. To add to the theatrical nature of the scene, musicians on board serenaded the shocked Europeans. “Some of the men were playing on musical instruments and drums,” Pigafetta noted in disbelief.
The proa’s crew signaled with elaborate gestures that they wished to board, and “eight old men, who were chiefs, entered the ships and took seats in the stern upon a carpet. They presented us with a painted wooden jar full of betel and areca (the fruit which they chew continually), and jasmine”—a shrub whose white and yellow flowers released a soft, almost cloying scent into the sea-permeated air—as well as orange blossoms, whose sweet intoxicating perfume the crew members had not sampled since Seville. The old chiefs brought much more: bolts of yellow silk cloth, two cages filled with flapping fowl, jars filled with sublime rice wine, and bundles of sugarcane. After depositing their offerings aboard Trinidad, the chiefs did the same with Victoria.
Their generosity toward the armada likely stemmed from a case of mistaken identity. Most of these regions had been visited by the Portuguese, who, traveling a different route, had pioneered trading relationships with the local Arab rulers. Ginés de Mafra described the rajah of Brunei as a “friend of the Portuguese and an enemy to the Castilian, whom he hates.” That made the Armada de Molucca an interloper, but many of the crew were Portuguese and appeared to be the latest emissaries of the Portuguese crown.
That night, the men, craving distraction from their trials, tasted the local rice wine, found it to their liking, and drank themselves into oblivion.